September 14, 2013

Snowden leaks reveal size of US Secret Police

By Mark Wachtler

September 14, 2013. (ONN) When Booz Allen Hamilton spy Edward Snowden leaked volumes of top secret government spy documents, it didn’t only expose the federal government’s spying on Americans and US allies. It also exposed for the first time exactly how many agencies, employees and money America’s spy apparatus enjoys. The list includes some surprising domestic spies.

As it has always been for decades, specific yearly spending on America’s secret police is…a secret. But thanks to the recent intelligence leaks by Edward Snowden, the American people now know exactly how much money and manpower the federal government uses toward spying on Americans and the rest of the world.

By the numbers

A report by the Washington Post reveals information the publication says was leaked to it by former NSA contractor and employee of the spy corporation Booz Allen Hamilton – Edward Snowden. The low level agent Snowden has since defected to Russia where he is being given political asylum. But the details in the information he leaked show a domestic and international spy network that dwarfs what most Americans envision when they think of the CIA and FBI.

One of the leaked documents is a copy of America’s entire 2013 spy budget, something that has always been a secret until now. It includes both international spying, as well as spying on America. The total amount given by Congress for 2013 espionage is a whopping $52.6 billion. The 178-page secret budget also reflects an espionage force of 107,035 government employees. That number doesn’t even include the unknown number of corporate contract spies like Edward Snowden and the rest of the Booz Allen staff.

Spy agencies, like the Dept of Energy

The leaked documents detailed by the Post also reveal how vast America’s domestic and international secret police force has become. The top secret spying budget for 2013 covers the funding for 16 federal spy agencies. Some Americans might be shocked to find out that agencies and departments like the Dept of Energy, the Treasury and the State Dept are included in the funding and list of spy agencies.

The 16 US secret police agencies (from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence):

• Air Force Intelligence

• Army Intelligence

• Central Intelligence Agency

• Coast Guard Intelligence

• Defense Intelligence Agency

• Department of Energy

• Department of Homeland Security

• Department of State

• Department of the Treasury

• Drug Enforcement Administration

• Federal Bureau of Investigation

• Marine Corp Intelligence

• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

• National Reconnaissance Office

• National Security Agency

• Navy Intelligence

Apparently, the days of having two spy agencies – one foreign and one domestic – are long gone. America seemed to do just fine with the FBI and CIA patrolling our streets and the world. In fact, government audits have repeatedly proven that the more agencies there are, the less communication there is and the more bad guys slip through. It also proves that much of the grossly expanded spy machine is nothing more than pork-barrel politics. In other words, kickbacks and bribes.

A deeper look at the numbers

For readers curious as to just how much ‘stuff’ the ‘Office of the Director of National Intelligence’ gets for that yearly $52.6 billion, we were too. Here’s what we figure:

-107,035 federal spies at roughly $100,000 per year salary = approx. $10 billion, plus another $10 billion in awesome government employee benefits.

One wonders what America’s spy agencies spend the other $32 billion on. Aside from computers, cameras, microphones, personnel and fuel, there isn’t much overhead. What there is an abundance of are for-profit spy corporations and corporate mercenary armies for-hire. Don’t forget, the second largest fighting force during the overthrow of Iraq wasn’t the British, it was the nameless, faceless army of American corporate military mercenaries.

The US spy industry includes hundreds, if not thousands, of for-profit corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton or the notorious Stratfor. That corporation, Stratfor, was exposed by Jeremy Hammond and Anonymous during one of their more daring battles with the global shadow government. One of the more interesting programs Stratfor was working on was a virtual time machine. As Whiteout Press reported previously, the computer program ties all cameras in America into one interactive video viewer.

Stratfor and TrapWire

Just like in the Denzel Washington movie Déjà vu, corporate spies can turn on a TV screen and watch anything and anyone, from any moment and any angle, in any location in the US. It’s like having your own personal satellite following you around 24 hours a day. And you can sit down and pop in a DVD and watch yourself at any time in the past. The network called TrapWire has some holes, admittedly. But thanks to the forced participation of all private cameras hooked into any online network, as well as the world’s spy satellites, there aren’t many blind spots.

And we don’t call the Stratfor program a virtual time machine for nothing. Thanks to the millions of documents stolen and released by Anonymous and their most accomplished hacker Jeremy Hammond, we know the project called Trapwire has just about perfected looking at any American at any location and any time, in the past. Other surveillance networks can watch any person in any place in the present. Between the two, the only thing missing is watching the future.

But Trapwire is publicly celebrated and promoted as a tool to do just that – see into the future. Using every step and movement of any person as guide, the corporation’s computers can allegedly predict who will eventually become a terrorist, when and where. The corporation’s own website admits, ‘TrapWire is a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning and introduce the basis for a paradigm shift in the methodologies traditionally applied to securing critical infrastructure, key resources and personnel.’

For further details, read the Whiteout Press article, ‘TrapWire and Time Travel, Denzel movie Déjà vu is real’.  For more information on Anonymous and Jeremy Hammond, read the Whiteout Press article, ‘Book Review – We Are Anonymous’.

The Washington Post admits they were sitting on the leaked top secret documents sent to them by Edward Snowden. It was only with the approval of the federal government that the Post was able to print the small amount of details they actually did. Their report includes the admission, ‘The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.’

It’s fitting that next week is both US Constitution Week, as well as Banned Books Week. After all, we wouldn’t want al Qaeda to find out how much money the taxpayers are paying Booz Allen to spy on Americans or Stratfor to build time machines. That might cause us to lose the war on terror. And with Americans being ‘for’ al Qaeda before we were ‘against’ them, and then ‘for’ them again, it’s a wonder the US spy apparatus even knows who the enemy is any longer.

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